Wednesday, August 2, 2017

As anyone who has
worked on the phenomenon knows, nostalgia is a lot more than a yearning for the
past. Firstly, nostalgia is a yearning/waiting for a past that is perceived to
have been lost (that is, perceived to be lacking) in the present. Secondly, it
is not a yearning for any kind of past, it is a yearning for an idealised past.
Thirdly, it is an active and/or passive yearning/waiting which entertains the
possibility of, and as such is hopeful that, such a lacking idealised past will
materialise in the future. All of this is part and parcel of the Lebanese migratory
yearning to return. First, in the process of migration, Lebanon or the village,
the land one imagines to have left behind, ‘back home’, is often slowly yearned
for and perceived to be what is lacking in the migratory present. Second, this
‘back home’ is quickly idealised as a place of plenitude and well-being in
opposition to the harsh land of migration where a kind of reality principle
prevails. Third, most Lebanese emigrants strongly believe in the eventuality of
return, even if not all of them are capable of actively pursuing it. The
nostalgic waiting for return is therefore a yearning to return to a past that
never existed but that is hopefully yet to come. It is in this sense that
nostalgic waiting can be called a hopeful waiting for a past-to-come. It therefore takes this general imaginary structure
(in the sense of the way it is thought by the nostalgic subject in the
present):

Idealised Present as lacking
idealised past the
future

past à of
plenitude and where the à as the past-to-

of plenitude yearning/waiting subject is come

Undoubtedly, this is a
form of waiting in that we have a subject negotiating their relation towards
the future from the present and with a specific past behind them. Intimations
of Arendt’s theorisation are clear (see introduction). At the same time,
however, it is a specific kind of waiting where the drama of negotiating the
future is staged as a desire to regain a lost plenitude. But to what extent is
this waiting for the past-to-come unique to the migratory experience? It can be
easily argued that this nostalgic waiting is not specific to migration as much
as it is specific to modernity. Is not all modern waiting structured by a sense
of loss of plenitude caused by industrialisation, urbanism, pollution and a
yearning for the plenitude of the countryside? Does not modernity by its very
nature stage a nostalgic subject who is forever waiting to overcome a sense of
loss and alienation? This modern yearning is always a yearning for a past time
as well as a past space. It could be argued that what characterises diasporic
waiting and diasporic modernity is that the emphasis on place becomes greater.
If the ‘classic’ modern European waiting is structured by yearning for a
predominantly conceived lost time, Diasporic waiting is structured by yearning
for a predominantly conceived lost place. We can easily see how this modern
structure of waiting/yearning sociologically shapes other forms of
waiting/yearning/seeking. Are not current forms of white nationalism in the
western world structured in exactly the same nostalgic way, with the white
nationalist subject imagining an idealised national past of plenitude (the
nation before x, y or z ruined it) and a yearning for a national future that is
precisely this idealised past now perceived as forthcoming?

Nonetheless, there are
arguments to be made for the universal nature rather than the modern, let alone
diasporic, specificity of nostalgic waiting. Such an argument comes from
psychoanalysis with the foundational role that ‘waiting for the breast’ plays
in the formation of the human subject. In its Freudian/Lacanian version, this
waiting for the breast initiated what is a distinctly nostalgic structure. This
is because the moment of waiting is the moment of awareness of a lack of
immediacy between needing and receiving. For as long as there is no waiting
there is no consciousness of one’s separate existence. It is the moment when we
need and have to wait for the breast that we become aware of our separateness.
However, this separateness is painful and the moment it is experienced one
begins to yearn for an imagined time when it did not exist. That is the
imagined moment where there was a kind of fusion between mother and baby and a
sense of plenitude that comes from this lack of separateness and the absence of
the need to wait. Thus, when we receive the breast, we get what we need (milk)
but we do not get what we desire (a return to the state of fusion with the
mother where we imagine that we did not even experience ‘need’). Consequently,
the desiring subject is a subject structured by nostalgia for this state of
plenitude and fusion for the mother, waiting for a past-to-come.

While claiming a
certain universality, we don’t need a reminder that the psychoanalytic claim is
nonetheless a western claim for universality. Integral to this psychoanalytic
argument is a more general phenomenological one about the universality of the
nostalgic subject: the very moment of consciousness is a consciousness of
‘separation from…’ and a yearning for lack of separation. But this kind of
separation rests on a very modern imaginary of the division between nature and
culture. Indeed, it does not take too much effort of the imagination to see
that what is staged here is an opposition between a state of nature (no
separation and plenitude) and a state of culture (separation and alienation)
with the subject of culture continuously yearning/waiting for a return to a
state of ‘being one with nature’. After all, one of the most fundamental manifestations
of this imaginary past plenitude/present lack/future as past-to-come remains
the structure of monotheist religion as it is present in the bible, where it
takes the form Garden of Eden/the fall as the present of the waiting subject/heaven
as the yearned for past-to-come.

The question of
cultural specificity/universality of the structure of nostalgic waiting ties
into the sociological argument presented above: to what extent have we
internalised this macro nostalgic structure of waiting and hoping? And to what
extent does it play a role in shaping all the micro modes of hoping we engage
in. As I write, I am passively and actively waiting for this afterword to
finish. Am I also unconsciously imagining in my very waiting and yearning for
an end, a state of plenitude, a return to a state of fusion with the mother, a
return home and a being one with nature all in one? Indeed, can one yearn/wait
non-nostalgically? Perhaps this is an important political question we are
facing today.

If nostalgic waiting
is structured among other things with a hopeful fantasy of being one with
nature ‘once again’. Is not this kind of waiting and hopefulness beginning to
crumble in our Anthropocenic age where we have to confront the impossibility of
this fantasy of one-ness ever coming to be fantasised again? And if this kind
of macro structure of waiting has a determining effect on other micro forms of
waiting, expecting, yearning and seeking, perhaps we are in the midst of one of
the most radical transformations of the way we experience our position ‘between
past and future’.